


What the Living Do

by galacticproportions



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, PostWar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-04
Updated: 2017-09-04
Packaged: 2018-12-23 19:49:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11996760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticproportions/pseuds/galacticproportions
Summary: Rey has a promise to keep to an old friend. Actually, two. Well, three if you count the Wookiee.





	What the Living Do

Wookiees live a long time, longer than Jedi—longer, at least, than all the Jedi this particular Wookiee knew. But Chewbacca wasn't young when he incurred his life debt, and the wound he sustained in the final battle—what they all _hope_ will be the final battle—wasn't only a physical one.

Rey wakes up, sometimes, with the sight in her mind fresh as blood: Chewbacca on the deck of the _Imperator_ with Kylo Ren's body in his arms, waves of _cub_ and _kinslayer_ and _failure_ and _love_ rolling off him fit to shake the ship to pieces, if it hadn't already been shaking. She knows he sees it far more often, claws it open again.

Still, when she says she's fitting out the _Falcon_ for the pilgrimage, he struggles up from the Fest-style bed of hot bricks that seems to ease the ache in his bones and growls, “I'll go with you.”

“I don't think so,” she says, gently for her. The last hyperflight they took, to get here, almost made his heart give out.

“I think I will.” He must know she's about to say, “Ask the medics,” because he adds, “To the sarlacc pit with the medics.”

“What do you want me to tell him?”

He sighs like wind in the vanished trees of Kashyyyk, settles back. “Tell him he's an idiot and I'm still angry.”

 

*

 

General Organa's message for her dead husband is much the same. “Tell him I haven't forgiven him,” she says. “Tell him that missing him this way is much worse.”

She couldn't possibly go, of course—playing her role in administering the peace takes all her time, especially since it's not her style. She confided to Rey once, “When I was small, I had a sweet life in a loving family on an ancient world, and I didn't know how to lose. Even when I understood what the Empire was, even when I started working for my father's cause, I didn't really—And then the Empire destroyed that world, and I still didn't know how to lose, I knew I had to keep winning, and to do that I had to fight.”

“And you did,” Rey remembers saying uncertainly. “We did.”

“We did,” the General agrees. “But now I don't know how--” She stopped, then, brushed it away, settled her shoulders, just as she's doing now. “I don't know why you have to do this,” she says, a little testily. “Surely if he's still present in the Force, Luke is with him now and telling him whatever he felt it was so important to get across that he had to use his _last words--_ ”

“I promised,” Rey says. “I have a thing about promises.”

General Organa looks at her, really looks. “So you do,” she says. “Come here.” They hold each other tight. “Come back to me,” she says. “I'm tired of people leaving.”

 

*

 

It turns out that when you go to talk to the dead, the living have a lot to say about it. Lando wants her to tell Han that technically he still owes him a thousand credits from their last dejarik match. Poe's message is a little muddled and maybe, if she's understanding it right, a little more intimate than she's going to feel comfortable speaking into the dark of space. Finn hugs her hard, the way he did when he and Han and Chewie first came to find her. “Should I tell him you're a big deal in the Resistance?” she asks. “It came true.” Technically, there is no more Resistance because there's nothing to resist; everyone who's left is supposed to be working together, and everyone calls themselves something else now. But everyone also remembers who they were, before, and Finn is a big deal wherever he goes and whatever he does.

“Tell him I'm alive and free because he took a chance on us, back then,” Finn says. “Tell him thanks.”

The trip is long, especially alone. She doesn't push the _Falcon,_ a veteran itself at this point. Even at an easy pace, Rey has to spend about a third of her time on running repairs and workarounds, and she doesn't sleep much.

 _I'm on my way,_ she tells Luke silently when she meditates. He told her once that it's unfinished business that keeps a spirit from merging with the Force entirely. She isn't sure if this counts or not. You could certainly make the case that Luke did everything he came into his life to do: equilibrium in the Force is restored, and the paths to using it as a tool of domination are dissolved. You could make the case that by charging her with this task—as annoying and arbitrary, in its way, as stacking rocks or trying to thread a needle with her mind—he was handing off his last obligations and once again making a run for it.

Since he died, she's never felt him in the force, specifically him, that coalescence of courage and yearning and self-loathing and weariness and impatience and kindness. But she still talks to him sometimes, in case. In case, when all those ways of being diffused into the greatness of all Being, some of them might like to hear how she is, or know that they're remembered.

 

*

 

There's nothing to orbit, now. There's only debris, shards of rocks and metal the size of cities. Rey uses the triangulating field she invented to “berth” the _Falcon_ between three asteroids—much more efficient than using fuel to keep a ship in place—and settles back in the pilot's chair, watching the distant stars through dust.

“Han,” she says out loud, and for whatever reason, doesn't feel foolish at all.

“I don't know if you're still here,” she says. “I don't know how that works, for someone who's not Force-sensitive, if you... Luke said he didn't know either. But he also asked me to tell you something, so here I am.”

She breathes, and it seems incredible to her that a person can be out here, out _here,_ and still be breathing, even though she's been doing just that off and on all her life.

“He said to say thank you for coming back for him, all the times you did. And he said he's sorry for not coming back to you sooner.” Rey doesn't cry much—it's a waste of water—but she's crying now, her chest heaving and a tightness behind her eyes. “You came back for me, too,” she says. “And you told me—you were the one who told me it was true, all of it. And it is true. It's beautiful, Han. It's terrible, and it's beautiful.”

She blows her nose, hard, on the hem of her robe. “Thank you for the _Falcon,”_ she says. “She's here too, she brought me here. I'll keep her flying as long as I can.”

She relays the other messages, and waits for an answer. The only sound is the tetchy operation of the _Falcon's_ engines, the thrum of her own heartbeat, the creak of the cracked and ancient bantha-leather of the seat cushion. Many people died here, not just Han, but the only impingement on her other senses as she stretches her Force-awareness out into the void is the background glow and darkness, intricately interwoven, of the galaxy itself.

It's not until she prepares for the jump that she realizes: like the needle-threading and the rock-moving, like the facing of her nightmares, this was for her, too. _Thank you, Luke,_ she says in her mind. There's no answer. But maybe the continued motion of her ship, the knowledge of her friends waiting at the end of her journey—and the reminder of light and darkness and life and death strung through the galaxy, in balance at last—is the best answer anyone ever gets.

 


End file.
